


Advent

by elizajane



Series: 25 Ways to Kiss a Naked Man [14]
Category: Eureka
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Gen, Kittens, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 17:57:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a snowstorm in Eureka and Jack brings home kittens. Pure Christmas fluff. [Nathan POV]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent

**Author's Note:**

> This story is dedicated to one of our local cat foster programs, [Black Cat Rescue](http://blackcatrescue.com/), from which my wife and I adopted our eldest cat. They're a no-kill organization and do great work on a shoestring budget.

Their third Christmas together, the system that regulates Eureka’s weather craps out on St.Nicholas Eve, right in the middle of a cold snap that’s dropped the entire Northwest corner of the nation into subzero temperatures (regardless of whether you measure in Fahrenheit or Celsius) followed up with about thirty inches (that would be 76.2 centimeters) of snow.

Both Jack and Nathan end up working through the night: Nathan at GD helping ABCDivision* get their usual December forecast -- the one that called for picturesque snow, regularly refreshed overnight with a fine powder suitable for skiing, in moderated cycles of sun and cloud cover -- back online; Jack making the rounds with Jo to all Eureka residents who lived out beyond easy walking distance of the town center, checking to ensure folks had heat and power and enough food to see them through.

The ABCers get their program back online at 7:03 the morning of December 6th. Nathan’s halfway home in the SUV before the exhaustion sets in and he can barely make sense of the snow-covered trees and the plowed banks and the tire treads on the road before him in the pre-dawn light. He makes it up the gravel drive and gratefully shuts off the engine.

The sheriff’s jeep is backed in to its usual spot below the stand of firs, ready for action should the need arise. There’s a thin, steady column of smoke rising from the chimney so Jack’s been home long enough to build a fire. From behind the steering wheel, Nathan can see the porch light on, and one of the lamps in the main living area, maybe the one over the stair, inviting him home.

He’d had _plans_ , damnit.

As a child in Belgium, on the night of December 5th, he would put out his shoes by the door of the family’s _l’appartement_ so that _Sinterklaas_ might bring him chocolate and other small gifts, tucked in his shoes. His mother had always arranged to leave work _dans l'après-midi_ , pulling him out of school so that they could bake _speculaas_ with the clay form that Pauline had inherited from her _grand-mère_.

That original mould is still (Nathan presumes) in his parents’ home, in Tunis. But his mother had sent him a new one several years ago, following her last trip to Aalst, along with the recipe she had always followed. It’s been in storage ever since.

Nathan had felt awkward unearthing and using it without the excuse a small child provides for the indulgence of holiday cookie-baking. He had also been afraid (he admits in honest moments) of the tidal wave of homesickness he knows will wash over him when the dough starts browning in the oven, filling the cabin with spice and butter and _family_ and _home_.

Jack isn’t a small child, exactly. (Nathan has bruises from certain weekend activities, three days old, to prove exactly how adult Jack is, in fact.) But there is something about the enthusiasm with which Jack throws himself into making Christmas, well, _Christmassy._ It resonates with the deeply-buried, heavily-safeguarded part of Nathan that longs wordlessly, endlessly for the home. For close-knit family and the world of his childhood. Something about Jack, about having Jack in his life, makes it safe to remember, and safe to -- slowly and carefully -- share.

Which is where the _speculaas_ had come in, and the small and meaningless (meaningful) gifts in Nathan’s sock drawer that he had planned to tuck in Jack’s shoes in the dark of the night.

But then it had started to snow, and had kept on snowing, and the temperature had begun to drop, and kept on dropping, and both their cell phones had gone off more or less simultaneously, and the past forty-eight hours had been one fucking thing after --

\-- Nathan passes a hand over his eyes and shoves the door of the SUV open. Nathan’s last macchiato had been three hours ago, and he was at the point where the desire to fall over and sleep for three days warred equally with a craving to drive back into town in order to pour a few shots from Vincent’s espresso machine straight into his eyeballs.

He’s managed to park next to one of the larger snowbanks, and stepping out of the driver’s seat he sinks up to mid-thigh. He struggles over to the back steps, his limbs slow to respond, his boots like lead weights strapped to his feet, like he’s standing in some sort of high-gravity pocket. Has that happened before in Eureka? He can’t, in that moment, remember.

He wonders, in passing, if the code is malfunctioning again, if he should turn around and drive back to work.

Jack doesn’t appear when Nathan opens the door to the mudroom, stomping snow out of his boots and hanging up his coat. He peels off his damp wool socks and unearths a dry pair from the basket they keep handy during snow-shoveling season, hopping into the kitchen as he pulls them on -- ah, warmth! -- and surveys the first floor for signs of life.

The box of frosted mini-wheats Jack favors and a mostly-empty bowl with sugary milk left in the bottom stands on the table next to one of Vincent’s compostable take-away cups, the alarming _trenta_ size Vincent started offering a few years back, likely filled with the truck-stop black coffee Jack favors after the night shift. Claims it makes him sleep like a baby.

Which probably means --

\--yep, there’s a man-shaped lump of feather comforter on the couch in front of the settling coals of the fire.

 _Warm_ , Nathan’s exhaustion-fogged brain points out. Jack would be _warm_. Clearly, there’s nothing for it but to make room for the both of them on the couch.

He pads around to the accessible side of the sofa, drops to his knees (remaining fully upright for another second is really beyond imagining), and leans in to kiss the dozing Jack awake, or at least nuzzle him drowsily into enough sleepy compliance that he’ll be willing to share the --

\-- “Ack! No! Kittens!” Jack yelps (yes, yelps), shoving at Nathan’s chest with his hands, hard, bracing his elbows to keep Nathan at arm’s length from his own torso.

His arms, Nathan notices, are bare, as is the slope of his shoulder where the feather comforter has slipped. Why is Jack-- “Kittens?” They’ve had occasion, in the past twenty months, to come up with a safe word or two, but even running on empty Nathan is fairly certain “Kittens” is not one they had ever used.

Jack keeps his left hand firmly braced on Nathan’s ribcage, but pulls back carefully to flip the edge of the duvet over with his right hand, exposing his naked torso to the elements.

Well, to his boyfriend’s sleepy admiration and the radiating heat from the fire, and --

\-- there, huddled against the heat of his bare chest, was a fluff -- no, two fluffs -- of coal black fur, taken together no bigger than Nathan’s closed fist.

“Kittens?” Nathan repeats, stupidly, blinking down.

“I think so,” Jack says, rubbing thumb and finger up and down the bridge of his nose, the equivalent of the shrug he can’t execute in his current position. “I haven’t had a chance to ask Taggert, but--”

Nathan reaches out a hand, gingerly, and runs a finger down what he thinks is the back of a furry head, complete with neatly folded ears. Except when he’s halfway through the downstroke the kitten winks out.

He jerks his hand back, reacting before what his senses are telling him can fully process through his slow-moving cerebral cortexes. “What--”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be back.” Jack yawns, scrubs his face again. “Jo and I thought -- ah, there, see?” The kitten blinks back into view again, approximately where it had been, although instead of being curled up around its sleeping comrade it was awake, on all fours, tail high, fur fluffed (if this were possible) further out in alarm, and -- judging by Jack’s involuntary flinch -- needle-sharp claws extended.

Before either man can react, the kitten seems to realize it's back on familiar ground, as it were, and begins kneading at Jack’s chest in a purposeful manner. A bumble-bee sound reaches Nathan’s ears: he realizes the thing is purring.

“Does it -- has it -- do they -- often?” He manages, extending a finger once more toward the insubstantiality currently making love to his boyfriend’s chest. (He has the slightly-hysterical thought that he should be protesting such intimacy on proprietary grounds.)

The second kitten stirs, stretches, and vanishes -- though before Nathan can fully take in the disappearance, it’s back again, about two inches higher up on Jack, curled up (still asleep) in the opposite direction.

“With a certain amount of regularity, yes.” Two years in Eureka have given Jack a near-native level of equanimity. “Any ideas?”

“Dare I ask how you acquired two spatiotemporally-challenged kittens?”

“I don’t exactly know,” Jack shifts slightly, freeing a hand so he can tickle kitten #1 under the chin with an index finger. The kitten pauses in its kneading and begins suckling on his finger. “Here, could you--?” He jerks his chin up and to the left, and Nathan sees a small saucer of milk and a twist of rag on the coffee table above his head.

“What do you mean you don’t exactly know?” Nathan asks, warily, once #1 had successfully latched onto the milk-soaked twist of rag and #2 had blinked out and in again to reappear in the crook of Jack’s neck, in a fold of flannel pillowcase. Exhaustion takes second place, for the moment, behind kittens of unknown and unstable origin.

“Well, Jo and I stopped by Mrs. Terwilliger’s, out on the south side of Dead Goat Hill, and after she fed us up on Tetley’s and gingerbread and explained how she’d cleared the six-foot drift from the kitchen roof by herself, we got back to the jeep and they were here -- there. I mean, they’d appeared. They were on the passenger seat, damp and icy from what we thought at the time was the storm. Almost entirely unresponsive. Jo tucked them inside her, um --” he gestured in the general area of Nathan’s chest, and Nathan nodded. He got the idea. “Yes, well. So obviously Jo was the one who first notice that, er, they seem to be having difficulty staying in one place. So to speak.”

“Taggert?”

“Haven’t been able to reach him. We drove back here about an hour ago and didn’t think it would be good idea to move them any further in the cold, so -- well, I figured keeping them warm and fed was the best thing to do.”

“Jo’s asleep in Zoe’s room upstairs,” he added, in a logical non sequitur.

Nathan touched a couple of fingers against the warm scrap of nothing tucked up beneath Jack’s chin. “We should call this one Penwiper,” he mused, half to himself.

Jack didn’t get the joke. “I was thinking maybe Mork and Mindy?”

Nathan leaned gingerly in to give him a kiss. “Whatever their names, I think they’re a perfect St. Nicholas Day present.”

“St. Nicholas Day?”

Nathan levered himself up from the floor. “Keep Mork and Mindy warm and fed. I’ve got some baking to do.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> *Atmosphere, Biosphere &, Climatology Division (affectionately known by their colleagues at Global Dynamics as The Weathermen, despite being comprised of women by a slim majority for the past three years) 
> 
> 1) The photographs I used for Mork and Mindy are of Dora, one of Black Cat Rescue's current foster kittens. She isn't ready for adoption yet, but you can follow the [BCR on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/blackcatrescue) for updates (and check out their many other sweet, sweet cats looking for caring homes). [UPDATE: 2015-03-15 - the image links seem to have broken; I'm working on replacements but in the meantime have removed the image embed code]
> 
> 2) In case you missed the allusion, Penwiper is a nod to Connie Willis' most wonderful novel _To Say Nothing of the Dog_ which you should read immediately if you have not already.
> 
> 3) Do I need to mention that _Mork and Mindy_ was a trippy 1970s television show in which Robin Williams played an alien named Mork on a reconnaissance trip to Earth?
> 
> 4) I grew up in a Dutch-American enclave where St. Nicholas Day was a thing. If you're unfamiliar with the tradition, you can learn more about the Turkish patron saint of children and sailors at the [St. Nicholas Center](http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/who-is-st-nicholas/).


End file.
